Tiffany's Design Director John Loring Proves That Good Things Come in Small Apartments

Suppose you're a design professional who spends all day making things perfect for clients with unlimited resources: You know exactly where to go to find that essential piece of five-figure hardware, or how to achieve a luminous patina with six layers of hand-rubbed paint. When it comes to designing your own home, though, your budget is necessarily more limited. Can you still transform a nondescript contemporary shoe box apartment into a knock-your-socks-off space for less than $5,000—without dipping into a collection of already-purchased furniture or designer freebies, or having the result look like a page from a home-furnishings catalogue?

If you're Val Selleck, a 36-year-old project manager for architectural and interior design work in the Palm Beach area, you call John Loring, the design director of Tiffany Co. and the person single-handedly responsible for the iconic firm's product design, display and store design for the past 26 years. "He's a great teacher," says Selleck. "I've learned a lot from working with him." The two have collaborated on three home renovation and interior redesigns in West Palm Beach, and they have come to know and trust each other's taste and instincts—a prerequisite for any project like this, but particularly one where the budget leaves little room for error. And Loring, a dapper, cheery man with the air of a preternaturally youthful Oxford don, leapt at this new challenge. "Every limitation in design is an opportunity," he says, his eyes twinkling at the memory.

"A can of spray paint is your best friend on a job like this," Loring quips.

The first limitations Loring had to deal with, other than the $5,000 ceiling on expenses, were the space he was working in—"a kind of non-architecture," he calls it, drily—and the physical requirements of the client himself. "He's six-foot-five," Loring points out, "and so all the furniture had to be in proportion." Both factors dictated the need for large-scale pieces—"big enough to take over the room," is how Loring puts it—so the first thing designer and client did was to purchase a pair of outsize black-lacquered bookcases and a Chinese screen. "You must start somewhere," says Loring, "and you should start with the biggest possibilities. Because they dictate what you will do from there on."

The screen, in particular, was the keynote to all that came after. To begin with, it was damaged goods—three panels of a four-panel screen, on sale (because of its missing panel) for a fraction of its original price at ABC Carpet Home. "To do a house on the kind of budget we had," remarks Loring, "you have to familiarize yourself with damage sales and thrift shops and merchandise that has had adventures in life." In this case, the screen's misadventure worked to the duo's advantage, since three panels took up less space in the small room than four, and the holes in the frame that marked the missing hinge were easily masked with a little woodfiller and a touch of black lacquer. When Selleck saw the result, he observed that its beige-and-black bamboo-and-lacquer color scheme reminded him of a classic Chanel shoe—and suddenly a design concept was born.

"Chanel wasn't just the most influential fashion designer of the 20th century," Loring says. "Her influence on high-style interior design was immense—and it's as valid today as it was in the late 1920s. Her favorite beige-and-black palette, and her fondness for black-lacquered Chinese screens, were ideas we could organize the whole apartment around." Organization is the key to avoiding the grab-bag look that is one pitfall of yard-sale trolling. "Things can't be too diverse, especially in a small space," Loring says. "Wherever a piece came from, there has to be a family resemblance between it and other pieces in the room."

So he and Selleck—who participated in all the design decisions—kept to their beige, brown and black palette and, wherever possible, used materials with tropical origins, like bamboo or palm-fiber matting, that had resonance for the apartment's West Palm Beach location. For the wall over a cream-colored sofa, Loring selected brown-and-black Central African Kuba cloths that Selleck had collected from a Manhattan dealer; their strong geometry stood up to the room's rectilinear architecture, and their price (around $20 apiece) was definitely right. Armchairs and dining chairs continued the dark-wood theme; other pieces, like the thrift-shop "Barcelona" table or the pair of wrought iron garden chairs in the bedroom, were spray-painted to make them harmonious. "On a job like this, a can of Krylon is your best friend," Loring quips.

The black-and-beige palette was continued in a series of four vintage movie-star portraits—contemporary with Palm Beach's pre–World War II heyday—as well as a movie still of Selleck, taken when he was a young actor back in Ukraine, which Loring added to the mix as a playful gesture. But because Selleck "likes depth and texture" in his surroundings, the pair spiked the apartment's neutral palette with a red-and-gold-lacquered Chinese leather trunk they discovered at ABC Carpet Home.

In addition to haunting closeout sales and flea markets for unexpected but inexpensive accent pieces—like a pair of 1940s pressed-glass candlesticks or a 1950s ceramic lamp—Selleck and Loring drew on merchandise from lower-priced retailers like The Home Depot, Crate Barrel and Lowe's. ("Lowe's has great lamps," Loring says conspiratorially.) Sometimes they used the results in unconventional ways: a bamboo floor mat from ABC Carpet Home became a headboard for the bed; a coverlet from Marshalls became a billowy curtain. Most surprising of all, perhaps, is the dining table the two created from a slab of glass and four-by-four pine timbers from The Home Depot, a frequent haunt of Selleck's for his building and restoration projects. Cutting the timbers into 16 two-foot-long sections, they piled them like a Japanese puzzle and topped them with glass; the result, says Loring, "is my favorite thing in the apartment."

"You have to familiarize yourself with damage sales, thrift shops and merchandise that has had adventures in life."

Selleck's favorite object, by contrast, is a 1960s photograph of a small Ukrainian boy, taken by Loring, who rummaged through his photo collection to find an appropriate image to blow up into a large-scale piece of art as a gift for his collaborator. "I'm from Ukraine," says Selleck, "and I love my country, so this photograph means a lot to me." Loring enlarged the image in pieces on an office copier, assembled the pieces, collage style, and mounted them on a four-by-eight slab of plywood to create a poster-size artwork that would make the room seem bigger. It's the kind of accent that instantly focuses the elements in this harmonious and elegant room—and it's made even more effective by the way it imbues the space with its owner's background and personality.

As Loring points out, however, it's a touch anyone could have devised—"with the right snapshot and a trip to Kinko's." Adds Selleck, with contagious enthusiasm: "That's the fun of a project like this—that anyone can do it. Anyone!" Somehow, he makes you believe it.

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